Magnetic tapes are widely used as low-cost and high-capacity portable recording media. For example, under the linear tape-open (LTO) Ultrium 6 standard, one tape cartridge is capable of recording 2.5 terabytes of data in an uncompressed state.
In general, in the process of recoding data in a recording medium, the data is temporarily stored in a temporary memory. As an example of a technique related to this, there is proposed an information recording system that prohibits ejection of an optical disk until completion of storage of information stored in a cache memory into the optical disk. In addition, a storage system is also proposed in which, as triggered by an event where an amount of input to and output from a target area in a cache memory falls below a certain value, the write method is switched from a write-after method to a write-through method, and then data is transferred via the cache memory.
Related techniques are disclosed in, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 08-255418 and Japanese National Publication of International Patent Application No. 2013-510360.
At the start of writing data to a magnetic tape, a tape drive performs “repositioning” of positioning a magnetic head to a data writing start position in the magnetic tape. A time consumed for this repositioning accounts for a relatively large proportion of a time consumed for an entire process of writing to the magnetic tape.
In recent years, in particular, as downsizing of a tape drive proceeds, a motor to run a magnetic tape tends to produce low driving force. This poses a problem in that longer time is consumed for repositioning, and accordingly longer time is consumed for the entire process of writing to the magnetic tape.